Five German airport tower systems successfully integrated into the ATM network

This week five German airports began transmitting Departure Planning Information (DPI) messages to the Network Manager Operations Centre.

It is essential for airports to share dynamic and highly accurate data with the European ATM network.

The Departure Planning Information (DPI) messages received from Advanced ATC TWR (tower) airports supply the Network Manager Operations Centre (NMOC) with the off-block event, Take-Off-Time, SID (standard instrument departure) and taxi-time information from the airport TWR systems in order to update the real-time flight situation prior to take-off. Together with UKBB (Kiev), the NMOC now receives DPI messages from six Advanced ATC Tower airports. This represents approximately 1% of the total traffic handled by the NMOC.

The five German airports use the Deutsche Flugsicherung’s (DFS) Advanced ATC TWR system, called FL@PS. The airports are: Greven, Bremen, Dresden, Erfurt and Saarbrücken.

This project is part of DFS’s overall plan to integrate 15 airports into the network. DFS aims to integrate 90% of the traffic in Germany into the ATM network via DPIs and Flight Update Messages (FUM).

These Advanced ATC TWR systems provide accurate Take-Off-Time (TOT) predictions (five to fifteen minutes before take-off) to the NMOC, which uses them to improve its traffic predictions and then shares these with all operational users.

The project, which started in September 2012, was executed in excellent cooperation with DFS and experts from the Network Manager Operations Centre.